School Cell Phone Ban Leads to Gadget Storage Trucks

Rather than spend the day without their mobile phones, students attending New York's cell phone-hating public schools have decided to leave their gadgets in the care of a gadget storage truck.

In a desperate bid to teach their students something, New York's public schools have completely banned cell phones. Now, the traditional way of getting around any rules regarding contraband is to take the offending item and cram it into your pocket, bag or rectum, depending the item's value and your tolerance for humiliation. Unfortunately for prospective phone-mules, a number of schools in the NY area have metal detectors, ostensibly to prevent kids from bringing a Glock to school in lieu of their homework. Metal detectors, it turns out, detect phones as well as guns.

A company called Pure Loyalty Electronic Device Storage is looking to take advantage of the average teen's dependence on tiny, beeping doodads by offering to store their phones for a dollar a day. The company has been deploying brightly-painted storage trucks outside schools that have metal detectors. The truck outside De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx serves an estimated 500 to 550 students a day and pulls in nearly $100,000 a year. Of course, I imagine there's some risks inherent in filling a small truck with thousands of dollars worth of electronics and parking it outside of a school without a high enough incidence of gun crime to warrant a metal detector.

Kids these days, eh? When I was a boy, not only did I not have a cell phone, I had to walk to school every day. Uphill. Through lava.